Hover Raider RX +2H - River Raid meets Flying Shark on the C64

Some of my earliest game development memories consisted of messing around in Sensible Software's amazing Shoot Em Up Construction Kit (SEUCK) on my Commodore 64. The well presented and easy to use graphical interface really made it as simple as possible to create and share your own Shoot-em-ups. Ok, the games would never really be as hardcore as dedicated shoot-em-ups written from scratch, like R-Type or Nemesis. Collectible power-ups, or horizontal scrolling would need some extra assembly programming to implement, and parallax scrolling was probably a little beyond the software's capabilities. But as games are still being released using the software today, the legacy of SEUCK lives on. As this SEUCK Trainers United release proves.

This is Hover Raider Redux, written by Martin Piper and Richard Bayliss for the latest issue of Reset Magazine. Graphics by Alf Yngve, and music by Richard Bayliss. As the title suggests, you pilot a hovercraft, capable of multi directional firing and you travel the vertical scrolling backdrops. Shooting boats, trucks, gun turrets and battle ships and more as you attempt to reach the further stages. The player, enemy and background sprites have been drawn really nicely, extra programming has been used for the animated water sections and the head up display, which are not features of vanilla SEUCK. The playability is also pretty solid: The game itself is not too easy, nor too hard. It reminded me a lot of River Raid, as driving into much of the backdrop sprites is lethal.

Whether or not you're a fan of SEUCK games in general, I recommend you check this one out. I might even have a crack at recreating some of the games I made in the past using SEUCK (I made some Operation Wolf clones by making the player sprite look like a gunsight, and dropping the bullet range to a really low number). Truly inspiring.